1. Field
The information disclosed in this patent relates to retrieval of stored images such as those available in collections over the Internet. 2. Background Information
Image search on the Internet typically involves a search engine specialized on finding pictures, images, animations, and other similar media. A user may enter keywords and search phrases into an image search engine to receive back a set of thumbnail images as search results that may be sorted by relevancy. Specialized search engines, such as those for image search, are among the fastest growing search services on the internet. In 2005 alone, the number of image searches increased by 91% according to a March 2006 Nielsen NetRatings. A reason for this is that community collections of web-based media are becoming commonplace and represent a growing, significant portion of the available Internet content.
Images containing landmarks include places that might be of interest to tourists and others due to notable physical features or historical significance. Whether manmade or naturally occurring, landmark images are important for education or travel-related search and exploration tasks and receive a significant contribution volume in the major photo sharing websites. For example, over 50,000 images on Flickr were tagged in 2007 with the text string Golden Gate Bridge, with over 28,000,000 public geotagged images on Flickr.
There are problems with obtaining representative and diverse views of the world landmarks from community-contributed collections on the web. For example, text annotations to the images provided by users often are inaccurate. The images themselves are of varying quality and the sheer volume of landmark images in any one collection makes image content hard to browse and represent, particularly since more photos are added everyday to a given database. What is needed is system to overcome these and other problems.